Chapter 12

“Want to come with me to the next contest?” I asked Ben.

He shot me a look. “You’re asking if I want to spend four days in the broiling sun in the middle of nowhere, culminating in a ‘banquet’ where we eat hamburgers off paper plates in a hangar because the coffee shop where they held it last year didn’t invite them back after the food fight?”

I couldn’t blame him. Contests were pretty boring for nonpilots. But it wasn’t going to stop me from pushing forward. I’d decided to save up for a single-seat Pitts, and to that end, I started working longer hours as a programming consultant and banking all my savings. I also volunteered to do all the night checkouts in the flying club so that I could put in extra hours there too. Perhaps fortunately, Ben’s company had been bought out, and his new employer demanded incredibly long hours, so I didn’t feel too bad about not being at home with him much. However, even with all my extra work hours, the numbers still weren’t adding up to buy my dream airplane. But then I got some unexpectedly good news.

It turned out my Pitts S-2A had appreciated in value. Demand had grown for two-seat factory-built aircraft. In less than a year, it had gone up by nearly 40 percent. A little sadly, I put it on the market, and it promptly sold for the astonishing sum of $55,000. I walked away with a substantial profit. After adding in my savings, I could pay off my loan and still have enough to make a hefty down payment on a used Pitts S-1T. With a much smaller loan on the S-1T, I could afford as much as $40,000 without renting it out. I broke open Trade-a-Plane once again. After many hours of searching and calling everyone in an ever-increasing circle around San Francisco, I found an airplane that appeared to meet all my criteria—in Oklahoma.

It’s a little nerve-racking to buy an airplane halfway across the country. What’s more, it was a single-seat airplane, so I couldn’t rely on the “training wheels” of an instructor to catch my mistakes. From everything I’d heard, the Pitts S-1 was even more unpredictable and difficult to manage than the S-2. It had taken me a full ten hours in the Pitts S-2A before Louie Robinson pronounced me safe to land it and checked me out in the plane. I’d never flown an airplane solo without completing a checkout flight with an instructor.

I’d be flying without a safety net from the very beginning.

Everything I had learned, every principle of safety I had absorbed, made it clear it was a mistake to fly an unfamiliar plane without sufficient training. Accident reports often listed the cause of fatalities as “unfamiliarity in type.” I’d be violating one of the safety policies I’d followed religiously ever since I’d begun flying. The statistics of crashing in a small airplane were ten to one hundred times worse than in an airliner. But I’d always told myself, even prided myself, that I held higher safety standards, that I would beat the statistics.

On one of the long commutes home from my consulting job, I debated whether I was doing the right thing. The thought of buying a single-seat Pitts gave me an incredible thrill. For the first time, I’d be buying an airplane not as a business decision, not to give flight lessons, but purely because I wanted it.

If I went through with the purchase, I’d be spending a huge amount of money on something that would be fun for me. It wouldn’t earn me money. It wouldn’t be a good investment. It wouldn’t make the world a better place. No, I was just buying it to convert irreplaceable fossil fuel into noise while drawing circles and lines in the sky.

It was incredibly selfish.

And that gave me even more of a thrill. It was either delayed rebellion, or a really early midlife crisis. Throughout my childhood, I admit to having been kind of boring. I didn’t take the usual stupid adolescent risks. In school I always did my homework. I followed my parents’ rules. If I rebelled, it was usually against my classmates, who called me disgusting for getting 100s on tests, who called me a freak, a goody-goody, a spic. After Don Schwartz, for instance, told me that maybe he and his friends “would go easier” on me if I didn’t do quite so well on tests, I’d redoubled my efforts. Ha!

So maybe flying was a form of rebellion against my parents and the rest of the world. Flying was the one thing I knew for certain they’d consider too dangerous. But I’d finally come to the point where I wanted to tell them. I didn’t want to mention anything about the aerobatics, though. Better to break the whole flying thing to them slowly.

“You better not tell your father,” my mother said when I told her over the phone.

Just then, my father picked up the extension.

“Cecilia, are you going to tell him?” my mother asked.

“What? Tell me what?”

“Dad, I’m taking flying lessons.”

“What? You’re crazy!”

“See! I told you not to tell him,” my mother chided.

Soon after that, she started clipping newspaper articles about plane crashes and mailing them to me. She warned me that I needed to think of others rather than just myself.

The word “selfish” hung in the air, unspoken.

As a child, I desperately wanted to make my mother happy, so I hid all my selfish inclinations from her. I pretended I was good, but I was secretly afraid that I was an evil person. My favorite characters were the villains, particularly female villains like Catwoman or the evil Queen Achren from Lloyd Alexander’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain. These badass women lived life on their own terms. They demanded what they wanted. They did all the things I never dared. Most of all, they had fun even though they were doomed to come to a bad end, just like I would if anyone were to find out what I was really like.

I never spoke of the appeal villains held for me to anyone until communication on the internet became widespread and I discovered that I was far from alone in my affection for the bad guys. Our society often defines “good” in females to be well-behaved, passive, and giving—actually, kind of boring. If a woman wants to do something interesting, break out of societal norms, or worst of all, become powerful, she’s often relegated to villain status.

Wanting to buy an airplane purely for the fun of it, a single-seat plane that only I could fly, was still my guilty secret. As I sped along the freeway in the left lane, though, something inside me, a part of me that had been crumpled up for many years, seemed to unfold and breathe deeply for the first time.

I was going to do it.

I laughed a full-throated, badass laugh.

* * *

After many phone calls, and airplane photos and copies of logbooks arriving in my mailbox, the seller and I agreed upon a price of $40,000 and a date for me to fly out to Oklahoma to inspect the airplane.

There was a well-known aerobatic flight school, Munson and Denny (M&D) Aviation, located not far away in Houston, Texas. I arranged for the seller, Doug Waldron, to fly his Pitts there so the M&D mechanics could inspect the plane, and Daniel “Doc” Munson, a well-known pilot on the national competition aerobatic scene, could give me some additional instruction in his two-seat Pitts in preparation for flying a single-seat airplane.

It was hot and humid when I arrived in Houston, and the air held a slightly sour odor with an almost metallic tang. I decided not to inquire too strenuously about what was being spewed into the atmosphere from the local factories.

Doc met me at the local airport for my lesson. I’d introduced myself to him over the phone as an Intermediate pilot looking to start flying Advanced, and that I’d just sold my Pitts S-2A to buy an S-1T. He greeted me like an old friend. With silver hair brushed back from a wise face and penetrating eyes, Doc had a wry, understated sense of humor. He was a local doctor who ran the flight school with his partner, Marge Denny. In his spare time he was an aircraft designer and Unlimited aerobatic competitor. I met Marge, who also flew Unlimited, later in the day. She had a Texas accent and was relentlessly cheerful and almost aggressively down-home. She possessed that hard edge I’d noticed some veteran women pilots seemed to acquire over time. Although I admired her tremendously, she intimidated me, and I was never quite sure how to act around her. She soon dubbed me “Granola,” since I hailed from Berkeley, which bothered me immensely, but of course I said nothing. I was pretty sure she meant it affectionately—pretty sure.

“Are you gonna try out for the US Aerobatic Team?” she asked. The Olympic team of aviation, consisting of the ten best aerobatic pilots in the United States, was selected every two years at the US National Aerobatic Competition to represent the United States at the World Aerobatic Championships. Marge and Doc were contenders for the team. I certainly wasn’t.

“I’m only flying Intermediate,” I protested, not sure if she was teasing me. “I just started competing a year ago.”

She scratched her ear but said nothing.

Doc, however, was so kind and encouraging that I felt instantly at ease. There are a lot of egos in this business, especially among top-ranked pilots, and given how famous he was, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Normally, I was very closed and a little prickly around strangers, but within a few minutes of meeting Doc, I’d found myself opening up about my hopes and fears.

“I’m worried about flying a single-seat airplane,” I told him in the closet-like instruction room in the back of the M&D lobby.

He leaned back in his chair. “You’re already flying a Pitts S-2A. You already know what to do. I’m not quite sure why you want to fly with me.”

“I want to be sure I’m completely safe landing a Pitts,” I explained. “I thought you could give me some extra tips, and check that I’m super current before I get into the S-1.”

“I’m happy to fly with you, but I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

The new plane, N521MS, had been in their hangar all morning getting a thorough inspection. We walked over to check it out. It was tiny, and up close I could see all the small imperfections in the paint scheme that hadn’t been visible in the photos. Doc eyed it critically and frowned as he checked the tailwheel. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a quiver of excitement that I might soon own this beautiful plane.

“I think the owner went to get some coffee,” Doc told me. “Why don’t we go flying now?”

The flight in Doc’s two-seat rental Pitts went smoothly. We stayed in the airport traffic pattern and practiced landings. Doc gave me tips on how the S-1 might differ from the S-2, and he pronounced me more than ready to solo the S-1T.

When we returned to the hangar, the owner, Doug Waldron, had just shown up. He wore a cowboy hat and answered every one of my rapid-fire questions in a laid-back drawl.

“Have you had any problems with the supplemental fuel tank?” I asked. The tank was an ungainly, homemade-looking welded hunk of metal that fit over the top wing in a rough airfoil shape and was designed to increase the plane’s range on cross-country flights. Translucent yellow tubing hung down from it and attached to a specially designed port.

He scratched his head and squinted at it. “You’re not supposed to fly aerobatics with it on,” he said after a long pause.

“How can you tell when it’s time to switch tanks?” I prodded.

He shrugged. “When the engine quits, I hit the boost pump and flip the switch.” He laughed. “’Course, if you’re nervous, you can watch for bubbles comin’ into this clear plastic tube here. That’s a sign the tank’s gettin’ a little dry.”

This S-1T was originally built by the Pitts factory, but Wal­­dron had the certification switched to experimental so he could modify the plane without going through the standard FAA certification process. This world of experimental aircraft was another new venture for me. Everything I’d flown up until now had been factory-certified, giving me the security of knowing it complied with rigorous testing and the exacting legal standards laid down by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Not so with this S-1T.

I checked the plane over dubiously. There were a number of homemade-­looking additions, like a small metal cylinder to the right and under the seat pan in the cockpit.

“That’s an accumulator,” Doug said. “Sometimes the oil pressure dropped on a long vertical upline, an’ the prop would bog down.”

“What?” I asked, not understanding.

“The prop revs slow down when the plane don’t know if it’s upright or inverted,” he explained. “I lost power on hammerheads, which ain’t too good during a sequence.” He grinned at me, his shoulders loose and relaxed as he talked about a situation that would have terrified me. “But I put in the accumulator, an’ it solved the problem.”

The reason I picked this plane out of all the other S-1Ts for sale around the country was precisely because Doug had flown in Unlimited competition. I figured he’d already found all its weak spots and addressed them with additions like this accumulator. Hopefully, my logic was sound.

Doc Munson’s mechanic pronounced the plane in good shape for a 1984 Pitts S-1T. He warned me, though, that the plane had been “flown hard, but it’s strong and can take it.”

I probed Doug further. “How long do you plan your flight legs for?” The airplane had a small main fuel tank, and even with the extended tank installed over the wing, I wouldn’t be able to fly very long before I needed to refuel. It was over 1,900 miles to my home airport—definitely the longest cross-­country flight I’d ever flown—and I was hoping for tips, for reassurance.

Doug drawled, “I dunno. I jus’ fly along till I see bubbles in that little tube, then I start lookin’ for an airport.”

Was he pulling my leg? It was kind of hard to tell with that weathered, deadpan face of his. Okay, my meticulous, maybe even a little obsessive-compulsive approach to flying might be just a bit abnormal. Apparently, a lot of people took flying far more casually than I did.

I tried to make more small talk with Doug as we finished up the inspection. “What kind of work do you do?”

He tipped his hat further back on his forehead. “I work in a bank.”

“What do you do there?” I pressed.

He looked away. “Aw, a little of this, a little of that.”

Guessing he was probably embarrassed about being a janitor or something, I didn’t push further. Later, I’d find out he was the bank president.

Even later, I’d hear from other pilots more harrowing tales about Doug’s escapades, like how he departed aerobatic contests by flying low over the runway until he built up speed, then pulling vertical, with that tank still mounted on the wings, and doing a full vertical roll before capping off and flying away, despite all the rules not to fly aerobatics when that wing tank is attached. Doug, it seemed, wasn’t a guy for rules.

The plane was pronounced satisfactory. I handed Doug his check, and he headed off. He didn’t appear noticeably happy, the way an airplane seller was supposed to act, but I couldn’t read his facial expressions anyway.

I was now the proud owner of a red-white-and-blue single-seat Pitts S-1T.

Doc Munson gave me a verbal checkout before I took the plane up for the first time, leaning over the cockpit and pointing out little details to me as I nervously hung on every word.

Eventually, I couldn’t avoid it any longer; it was time for me to get into the airplane and fly. The best news was I didn’t need my elevator shoes or my forty pounds of lead weights. The plane would fly fine with me just the way I was.

I decided to spend lots of time taxiing the plane around the airport, memorizing landing attitude, imagining what it would be like to land. Better to be cautious. Yep. The plane was incredibly responsive. Actually, it was squirrelly. The lightest tap on a rudder pedal sent the nose careening off in first one direction, then the other. I felt like I was balancing on top of an overinflated beach ball, always on the edge of losing my balance and falling to the ground with a splat. I caught a few swerves in the nick of time, before the plane pivoted too far and started to enter the dreaded ground loop. I was getting more and more nervous. If it was this hard to taxi, how was I ever going to land? More newspaper headlines flashed through my mind: berkeley, california, woman crashes plane on first texas flight. “Well, she ate granola, like all those other left-­coasters, so what do you expect?” Marge Denny would tell the reporters.

Stuffing down my overactive imagination, I did a few fast taxis on a long, deserted taxiway. Then I taxied around slowly some more. A crowd had gathered in front of the hangar, watching the spectacle of the “little gal” flying a single-seat airplane for the first time.

That was it. I screwed up my courage, taxied to the runway, did a final pretakeoff check, then a second one. At last, I made a call over the handheld radio tie-wrapped to one of the cockpit spars and advanced the throttle.

Oh. My. God. The plane accelerated like crazy as the engine roared, and the sleek metal beast reared up on its wheels with ferocity. If my S-2A was a thoroughbred horse, skittish but bred for the racetrack, this S-1T was a sinewy tiger, a wild animal. With me hanging onto the controls for dear life, it started to veer crazily toward one side of the narrow runway, but by then I’d gained flying speed. I yanked it off the ground and was airborne.

It flew like a rocket ship, like nothing I’d ever handled before. I’ve got a tiger by the tail, I couldn’t help thinking. Two hundred horsepower and under a thousand pounds gross weight meant it was overpowered as hell. We were at altitude almost before I exhaled for the first time after takeoff. The runway lay so far behind me that it was scary to look over my shoulder at it.

Just a caress of my hand on the ailerons and we swung into a wild bank, the plane pirouetting at my touch. It hummed with satisfaction at finally being unleashed into the sky, cavorting into the wild blue like an animal on steroids.

I’d been instructed to try a few stalls and gentle maneuvers and then come back in for a landing before doing aerobatics, but I couldn’t help myself. My hands sticky on the controls, I rolled and spun, flying Immelmann turns, point rolls, hammerheads. I almost couldn’t stop, it was so exhilarating.

This was it. This was the dance I’d always dreamed of, the plane barely getting between my mind and my body. I’d tightened the seat belts, ratcheted them down as tight as I could, like I was welded into the airplane, like it was a part of my body. Of course, I was now joined with an overpowered, crazed monster about to tear off out of control.

It was spectacular.

I glanced at the ground again to get my bearings, and suddenly realized I couldn’t see the airport any longer. My pulse accelerated. Back home, I was intimately familiar with the terrain and knew exactly where I was at every second. But here, I was disoriented. What if I couldn’t find the airport again? What if I ran out of gas? I’d jammed a Houston sectional chart under my thigh and took a few seconds to wiggle it free. I flew in aimless circles, peering this way and that, until I finally spotted a few landmarks and my breathing settled. Thank God. I wasn’t too far away from the airport after all. Better head back. At least I didn’t embarrass myself by making a radio call admitting I was lost.

I flew a tight pattern and headed on in. My palms were damp with sweat and my heart was hammering. Next step: Could I land this thing safely?

I made my position report over the radio, checked for other traffic in the pattern, and began my final descent to the runway. I reduced the throttle nearly to idle with the runway in sight, green fields all around. On high alert, all senses quivering, my hands and feet jittered on the controls.

With the throttle at idle, the Pitts glided like a free-falling safe. The plane wasn’t designed to be aerodynamic. To fly powered aerobatics, you needed plenty of thrust accompanied by plenty of drag. This gave you the ability to essentially start and stop abruptly in the air. It made for incredible flexibility when performing aerobatic figures, but unfortunately, it wasn’t so good for landing.

I was sinking—fast. I had some experience with the S-2A, but this unfamiliar, smaller, wigglier airplane possessed even more of the infamous Pitts characteristics than the two-seat version.

Okay. Deep breaths to keep from panicking. I can do this. Keep the end of the runway steady in the windshield. I could glide to that spot.

But it was coming up awfully fast. If I didn’t do something soon, I was going to crash for sure. Now I was on short final descent, only a few dozen feet above the ground. The nose blocked my view of the runway completely, but I needed to line it up exactly with the strip of pavement, while at the same time keeping track of exactly how far I was above the runway—in feet and then in inches. It sounded impossible—landing without seeing where I was going—but flying had taught me the human body and mind were incredibly adaptable.

There was plenty of sensory information my brain could use while landing. In my peripheral vision, both edges of the runway rose to meet me. Also in my peripheral vision, the runway centerline appeared in the plexiglass window between my feet. The stick slackened as the airplane slowed down, an excellent airspeed indicator. The whoosh of air rushing past the fuselage lessened. Finally, the closer I got to the ground, the more pungent the scent of the earth and asphalt became. Some Pitts pilots claim they land the airplane by smell alone.

I couldn’t help remembering that landing accidents make up a large part of crash statistics. And as I’d learned in the Citabria checkout, taildraggers always wanted to swap ends in a ground loop. The Pitts, of course, was significantly faster and more unstable on the ground than a Citabria.

The riskiest part of a landing is always immediately after you touch down. Ahhh! I’ve made it onto the ground without crashing! The hard part is done, you think. Unconsciously, you relax on the controls. In a nosewheel aircraft like a Cessna, this isn’t a problem; its inherent stability will keep the airplane tracking straight on the runway, no matter what you do. Not so in a Pitts.

Further, the plane I’d just purchased had been retrofitted with an experimental tailwheel without a steering spring. Although I’d noted it on preflight, I hadn’t realized the full extent of its effects. I was about to learn a big lesson.

I touched down in a three-point landing attitude and tapped the rudders to keep the airplane straight. With the tailwheel in the locked position, it was supposed to be fairly stable. But to my shock, as the plane slowed down, it veered to the right. I’d been dreading the possibility of a ground loop during the entire flight. With this fear filling my mind, I kept hearing the words an old-time pilot had said one day in the hangar. “If you ever get into a ground loop, you just need to hang on and go along for the ride.”

This turned out to be terrible advice. I bumped along the runway, stick all the way back into my belly. It was hot and muggy on the ground, and the sun glared through my windshield as I fought the unfamiliar airplane and my own burgeoning panic.

The plane swerved further to the right. “Hang on and go along for the ride,” echoed in my head, and I made the critical mistake of letting my feet relax. Of giving up, and becoming a passenger, not a pilot. To my horror and dismay, the plane did something I’d never seen before. It bumped off the edge of the runway and into the soft earth, where it gradually slowed down, and then slowly, excruciatingly slowly, tipped forward onto its nose and buried itself into the ground with its tail in the air.

I’d gone along for the ride, and now I sat, thrown uncomfortably forward into the straps, staring through the windshield, not at the sky, but at the loamy earth and yellow-green weeds at the edge of the Texas runway. The engine abruptly stopped as the propeller bit into the soft ground. Reflexively, I turned off the ignition and pulled the mixture to stop fuel flow to the engine.

Then I sat there, shame pouring over me in waves. I’d done the unthinkable. Wrecked my new Pitts on the very first landing. I was devastated. I couldn’t move because of the flush of humiliation suffusing my face and skin. I was INTF—Incompetent, Nerd, Terrified, Failure. A bad pilot. Every criticism I’d ever heard came back to me. “Women just don’t know how to handle machines.” “They’re terrible drivers, and rotten pilots.” “Amelia Earhart didn’t know how to land, and neither do you.” “You fly this thing?” “What’s a little girl like you doing in this man’s world?” “Rod-ree-kezz, you freak.”

Dimly, I saw out of the corner of my eye that several people had emerged from M&D Aviation and were rushing to the runway. Doc Munson was the first to reach me. He ran to the tail of the airplane and yanked it down. Now the plane was back in the familiar three-point attitude, and my frozen brain started to click along again. What had I done? I’d given up my control of the airplane. I thought I’d learned that lesson before, but apparently, I needed to keep on learning it.

Doc Munson came to my side. “What happened? You never deviated from the centerline when we flew together.”

I bowed my head, unable to say anything through my mortification. I climbed out of the airplane and sat on the grass.

“Is the plane okay?” I finally asked. One of the M&D mechanics was checking the propeller and the undersides of the lower wing.

“I don’t see anything obvious, but let’s get it back in the hangar,” said Doc.

The five witnesses to my disgrace and I pushed it back along the taxiways. Running the gauntlet, we walked past rows of spectators.

A big guy called out, “What happened?”

I certainly wasn’t going to answer, and I was slightly comforted that neither Doc nor any of his staff said anything.

Finally, we got to the relative safety of the hangar, where I sank down onto a stool while the others inspected the airplane. Doc checked the propeller.

“You’re lucky the ground was so soft, and you were going so slowly,” he said with a relieved breath. “No damage at all to the prop.”

“What about the wings?” I asked.

“Did you drag one?”

“I don’t really remember.”

He straightened from his examination. “I don’t even see any grass stains. I think you got lucky. No damage at all to the airplane.” He walked around the aircraft, and then bent to examine the tailwheel. “Uh oh.”

“What is it?” I asked, worried that I’d done something worse.

“I’ve never seen a Haigh tailwheel with this much play in it.” He wiggled the tailwheel and the plane shook from side to side. “No wonder you couldn’t keep it straight. Don’t blame yourself.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You came out okay. You didn’t ground loop; you didn’t put a speck of damage on the airplane. Just a little runway deviation because there was a problem with the tailwheel.”

They replaced the tailwheel, but I knew that despite Doc’s attempt at reassurance, the problem wasn’t defective equipment. Doug hadn’t had any difficulties landing the plane. It was because I was a defective human being. It was my fault. It always was my fault.

That night in my hotel room, I couldn’t stop going over and over again what could have happened during that landing, what I could have done better. I could have been more aggressive with the rudders. I could have refused to “just go along for the ride.” The air conditioner in the room rattled and whined, and when it stopped, water plopped onto the linoleum flooring. Drip, drip, drip. I twisted myself up in the sheets and shoved the pillows from side to side, but couldn’t get comfortable.

There was an ache in my chest, a hot ingot of shame just under my ribs. I’d given up my authority over the airplane for a split second, and that had been enough to lose control of it. I’d allowed the words of others to worm their way into my soul once again.

It took a long time to fall asleep in that dark and muggy hotel room.

The next day, I returned to the airport, still ashamed and subdued. The M&D mechanic installed a new tailwheel on my Pitts as I watched, and I could see for myself what a difference it made. I knew I’d have to get back in the cockpit and fly again. My shame was like a cattle prod goading me over my fear. I preflighted and strapped in again, taking lots of deep breaths.

But I needn’t have worried. I flew the Pitts several times around the pattern, landing perfectly each time. The new tailwheel did make a difference. I started to feel a little better.

Later that day, I said goodbye to my new friends at M&D Aviation, and took off in my very own single-seat plane heading west. Ahead of me lay 1,900 miles of terrain I’d never seen and at least four or five fuel stops at airports I’d never visited. I was flying an unfamiliar airplane with, as was typical for a Pitts in those days, no electrical system, no working navigation instruments, a compass that pointed in the wrong direction, no portable GPS, nothing but a stack of aviation charts shoved under my thigh and the wide world below me.

As I flew over thousands of miles across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, over mountains and deserts, through the Tehachapi Pass and into the Central Valley, the color of the earth changed from green to brown, and the scent of the air shifted from agriculture and farms to creosote and sage. For hundreds of square miles, not a single human walked the ground below me.

I was alone in that single-seat airplane, alone with my judgments, my decisions.

The hours passed slowly. Cool, thin air blew in through the vents. I had plenty of time to ponder what had just happened. Once again, I’d let old instincts from my childhood take over. Deep underneath, I still believed there was something wrong with making my own decisions, with acting, with taking power in the world. That it was better to be a passenger than a pilot. That it was shameful to take action.

But that little Pitts had taught me something new. It was up to me now. I’d never give up control of an airplane again. I’d keep flying, no matter what. There was a difference between control and selfishness, between the wide world and the constriction of my own old beliefs.

As I flew, the landscape unrolled beneath me. The flat central plains of Texas morphed into the folded and wrinkled high desert of New Mexico. In a jet, one flies too high to get a sense of the human scale of life on this earth. And when you drive, you can’t see anything at all beyond the road signs and the gas stations and shops lining the highways. It’s sometimes hard to get exactly the right perspective in a constantly changing world.

But the earth was beautiful, and my little airplane was carrying me over it at just the right altitude. Being the only person at the controls of my life wasn’t selfish. It was necessary. I was a pilot, not a passenger, and I too could be badass.